What can(t) the VR-using body do? The politics of embodiment in virtual reality

This article considers the politics of virtual reality (VR) technology's mediation of the body and body-environment relations. It centers the relationship between VR and its users' bodies in order to expound the particular sociospatial and political relations that materialize in this mediated subject. The VR-using body is thus positioned as a newly configured technopolitical site with emergent, situated, and contextual attributes. Herein, the manifold forms this mediation takes are explored through two case studies that evidence very different impacts VR can have on a body's capacities, empowerment, and autonomy. Attending to two contrasting implications VR can have for users' bodies, this article invites consideration of the contingent and indeterminate nature of an emerging technology's political effects on users' experiences of embodiment and emplacement in the digital age. Both cases concern VR's body tracking technology, as it facilitates the transposition of the physical body into a virtual environment. The article takes concern with the data extraction and surveillance made possible by this technology, while also attending to its potentials for providing new, liberatory experiences of virtual embodiment. To do so, I analyze the privacy policy of Meta's Quest VR headset in order to situate the consumer VR market within contemporary surveillance capitalism. Following this discussion, the VR program Figural Bodies is illustrated through interviews with its creators, in which the possibilities for VR's tracking technologies to be designed for inclusivity, affirmative body-technology relations, and self-determination are explored.